Exploring Language Teacher Identity

Work as Ethical Self-Formation

ELIZABETH R. MILLER,1 BRIAN MORGAN,2 and ADRIANA L. MEDINA3
1
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Department of English, 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte,
NC, 28223 Email: ermiller@uncc.edu
2
Glendon College, York University, English Department, 2275 Bayview Ave, Toronto, ON, M4N 3M6, Canada
Email: bmorgan@glendon.yorku.ca
3
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Department of Reading and Elementary Education, 9201
University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC, 28226 Email: AdrianaLMedina@uncc.edu

In this article, we treat language teacher identity as foundational to educational practice and see Fou-
cault’s (1983, 1997) notion of ethical self-formation, and its adoption in teacher education research
by Clarke (2008, 2009, 2010), as providing a potential vehicle for understanding the development of
teacher agency and critical identity work. We use the 4 axes of Foucault’s (1983) approach to ethical
self-formation, as captured in Clarke’s (2009) “Diagram for Doing Identity Work,” in exploring a case
study of an elementary reading and language arts teacher who worked in a multilingual inclusion class-
room with exceptional (i.e., learning disabled) and mainstreamed students. We consider the relevance
of how this teacher’s identity developed over the course of 7 interviews, spanning 9 years, for teacher
identity work in language teacher education (LTE). In doing so, we foreground the critical as well as the
dangerous potential of all teachers’ identity work and argue for the importance of nurturing teachers’
reflective, action-oriented identity practices as well as fostering a self-awareness of language teachers as
ethical subjects “acting on others” (Foucault, 1997, p. 262) even as they struggle within power relations
that press upon educational practices and discourses.
Keywords: language teacher identity; identity work; ethical self-formation; Foucault

(RE)CONCEPTUALIZING LANGUAGE
TEACHER IDENTITY
“It’s important to me to do the right thing and to make sure
that I was successful and the teachers were successful and
that the kids were successful.”
THE PRECEDING COMMENT WAS PRO-
duced in an interview conversation by our focal
research participant, JC (pseudonym). We find in
this short comment evidence of his investment in
an identity of a successful teacher as well as evi-
dence of his committed engagement to his fellow
teachers and students. JC casts his efforts toward
achieving success as a teacher as ethical in noting
that it was important for him “to do the right
thing.” In this article, we explore the co-emergent
development of teacher identity and ethical prac-
The Modern Language Journal, 101 (Supplement 2017)
DOI: 10.1111/modl.12371
0026-7902/17/91–105 $1.50/0

C 2017 The Modern Language Journal
tice in relation to JC’s identity work with the goal
of advancing Foucault’s (1983) notion of ethical
self-formation for language teacher education.
We see this engagement with ethical self-
formation as crucial to the notion of language
teacher identity (LTI), the theme of this special is-
sue of The Modern Language Journal. The notion of
identity, in its field-internal development in lan-
guage teacher education (LTE) and applied lin-
guistics, has been closely aligned with poststruc-
tural thought (Norton & Morgan, 2013), whereby
identity/subjectivity is itself conceptualized as a
site of conflict, contradiction, and change (Darvin
& Norton, 2015; Norton, 2000, 2013) and where
both dominant and transgressive identity posi-
tions are negotiated within/through powerful dis-
courses and ideologies. Foucault has been a key
theoretical figure for this type of poststructural
inquiry. In this article, we see Foucault’s work on
ethical self-formation, and its specific realization
for LTI by Clarke (2009), as particularly relevant
for expanding the purposes and values that in-
form LTE programs.
92
As noted, the boundaries of LTI work have
been clearly redrawn and reconceptualized by way
of poststructural theory, a development shared
across numerous disciplines (e.g., philosophy, ed-
ucation, gender studies, cultural studies). At the
same time, we should also consider the extent to
which the qualities and possibilities we attribute
to LTI are field-internal, uniquely shaped by the
knowledge base and forms of self-understanding
mobilized within LTE domains (e.g., Cheung,
Said, & Park, 2015; Trent, Gao, & Gu, 2014; Vargh-
ese et al., 2005). That is, acquiring a professional
LTI involves a deep and sustained immersion into
language (texts, genres, lexico-grammar) as well
as particular descriptive and pedagogical skills
that facilitate second/additional language learn-
ing across varied sites of practice. These field-
internal dimensions of LTI formation are a mixed
blessing, of course. On the one hand, they il-
luminate the role of language—and specific lin-
guistic choices—in discourses and identities, and
the construction of social realities to which ethi-
cal decision-making must respond. On the other
hand, they raise important genealogical questions
(Foucault, 1983, 1997) regarding the formation
and regulation of a discipline over time (e.g., ap-
plied linguistics, LTE) and the types of insights
lost or displaced along the way. In respect to LTI
formation, there is always the risk that we have be-
come too focused on language as a decontextual-
ized and de-politicized code or object to see its
social potential.
In addressing this risk, we contend that a recon-
ceptualization of LTI requires a concomitant
foregrounding of language as social practice,
a perspective similarly, but not exclusively, in-
formed by poststructural theory (Kramsch,
2012; McNamara, 2012; Norton, 2013; Norton &
Morgan, 2013). Orienting to language as social
practice entails a radical reorientation in its
ontology—from pre-existing resource or prop-
erty of mind to an emergent, relational, and
person-formative activity, interconnected with
divergent histories and shifting power relations.
Language conceptualized as activity embodies
certain identity-forming properties eloquently
conceptualized as languaging by Maturana and
Varela (1998):
It is by languaging that the act of knowing, in the be-
havioral coordination which is language, brings forth
a world. We work out our lives in a mutual linguistic
coupling, not because language permits us to reveal
ourselves but because we are constituted in language
in a continuous becoming that we bring forth with
others. (p. 26, cited in García & Li Wei, 2014, p. 8)
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
If we regard language and identity as emer-
gent products of social and symbolic interaction
(Pennycook, 2010), then we cannot overlook the
ethical dimensions of this interaction in relation
to teacher identity work, for as Hicks (2000) con-
tends, anytime we respond to, engage with, and
co-construct meaning with others we are engaged
in ethical work. And if we are to better anticipate
possibilities and consequences related to LTI, eth-
ical work is most relevant when perceived through
an interdisciplinary lens, a perspective we share
with the Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2016). We
believe that it is through engagement with other
fields and through exploring theoretical perspec-
tives that have been developed outside of applied
linguistics that the strengths and limitations of
our own areas of expertise are best illuminated
and possibly addressed. In particular, our in-
terdisciplinary focus draws on work in teacher
education and teacher identity, fields of mutual
interest and pedagogical proximity, as well as on
Foucauldian perspectives of ethics and the self.
We find Clarke’s work to be particularly useful
for our analysis, given that he offers a bridging
dialogue between the fields of teacher education
and language teacher education in interpreting
and applying Foucault’s late work on the interre-
lationship between ethics and politics to aspects
of teacher education and identity (Clarke, 2008,
2010; see also Clarke & Hennig, 2013; Morgan
& Clarke, 2011). We draw directly on Clarke’s
(2009) articulation of Foucault’s (1983) four
axes of ethical self-formation in exploring the
practice-bound, language-based identity work of
JC. By doing so, we hope to illuminate the critical
efficacy of all teachers’ identity work as well as its
dangerous potential (cf. Foucault, 1997).
LANGUAGE TEACHER IDENTITY WORK AS
ETHICAL SELF-FORMATION
There have been a number of important contri-
butions to the consideration of ethics in language
teacher practices (Hafernik, Messerschmitt, &
Vandrick, 2014; Johnston, 2003; Kumaravadivelu,
2012; Messerschmitt, Hafernik, & Vandrick, 1997;
Wong & Canagarajah, 2009) as well as to the need
for scholars of language learning to engage in
ethical practice in their own research (De Costa,
2016; Ortega, 2005). Foucault’s notion of ethi-
cal self-formation takes us in a somewhat differ-
ent direction. Rather than adherence to any par-
ticular moral code, Foucault (1983) regards it
as “a sort of work, an activity” (p. 243) that re-
quires work on the self by the self (i.e., our bod-
ies, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors), sometimes
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
referred to as “technologies of the self” (Fou-
cault, 1988, p. 18), in order to “improve the self”
(Foucault, 1983, p. 243). Foucault’s conception of
ethical self-formation comes primarily from what
some scholars refer to as his “later ‘ethical’ works”
(e.g., Clarke & Hennig, 2013, p. 79; see also In-
finito, 2003). In stipulating that freedom of the
self is fundamental to ethical practice, Foucault
does not entirely abandon his earlier emphasis
on the disciplinary effects of coercive power on
the self. Language teachers’ ethical self-formation
thus does not entail freedom from power, but
rather it can be regarded as the productive exer-
cise of power. It develops in the “critical and cre-
ative capacities brought forth in praxis” (Infinito,
2003, p. 160, italics added).
While Foucault’s approach deliberately avoids
recourse to a universalist moral code for de-
termining what is desirable or what constitutes
improvement of self, language teachers’ ethical
practices must still be understood as unavoidably
responsive to the values promoted in a given
sociopolitical milieu and the identity options con-
stituted in particular discursive practices. Teacher
identity work does not develop in the absence of
“technologies of power” (Foucault, 1988, p. 18),
and thus considerations of ethical self-formation
necessarily require attention to the co-constitutive
effects of sociopolitical and individual operations
as they are enacted in language. On this point,
Clarke and Phelan (2015) argue that teachers’
ethical self-formation is based in their doubled
“realization of their (im)potentiality as ‘I can,
I cannot’” (p. 10). While there are controlling
influences that teachers cannot change or evade
(i.e., “I cannot”), in recognizing the contingency
of their identities and, to some degree, the con-
tingency of many relations of power, teachers can
learn to engage in continued reflection (Infinito,
2003). Such reflection can, in turn, help them
recognize dominant ideologies of teaching (Drey-
fus & Rabinow, 1983) and to sometimes resist or
even transform them through participation in
language practices (i.e., “I can”).
While all language teachers engage in ethical
work in terms of working on the self in order to
improve their practice and to enhance their stu-
dents’ language learning success, what teachers
and teacher educators cannot neglect is the need
to foster language teachers’ persistent critical en-
gagement with the work of ethical self-formation.
In coming to recognize that there is no singular
norm by which to develop into a better teacher,
language teachers can begin to understand that
the work of teaching requires them to make judg-
ments where there is no certainty, to move beyond
93
the given (Clarke & Phelan, 2015). In fact, com-
ing to recognize the paradoxes and tensions be-
tween competing discourses regarding how to be
a better teacher—many of which might seem com-
monsensical to them—language teachers are bet-
ter able to engage in productive, practiced, ethi-
cal identity work rather than seeking the comfort
that comes from a stable and/or familiar identity.
There is no timeless or universal ethical self to
which language teachers can or even should as-
pire. Identity work involves practicing, rather than
mastering, ethical self-formation.
ANALYZING A TEACHER’S IDENTITY WORK
Research Context and Focal Participant
In this section, we analyze how our focal par-
ticipant, JC, portrays his teacher identity across a
series of seven interviews, allowing us a glimpse
into how his teacher identity developed over 9
years of his teaching life. In examining how his
portrayal of his identity work changed across
the interviews, we can trace how JC transitioned
from a tentative, uncertain classroom teacher
into a confident, successful educator. Though
this development is heartening, we find his case
troubling as well. That is, there appears to be a
co-development of JC changing to become a suc-
cessful classroom teacher along with a narrowing
of scope for ethical self-formation. This seeming
paradox requires further scrutiny.
In line with orienting to language as social
practice, we view interview accounts as jointly
constructed and relationally contingent, that is,
as emergent from situated discursive practices
rather than unilateral productions by the inter-
viewee (Miller, 2011, 2014; Talmy, 2010). We are
aware that these interview accounts are not nec-
essarily complete or fully accurate representa-
tions of what JC actually did in his classroom
and that they were framed for a particular inter-
viewer/audience: a member of the professional
development (PD) team working at his elemen-
tary school. The early interviews focused primar-
ily on his experiences as a new inclusion teacher,
and the later interviews focused on JC’s imple-
mentation of the teaching strategies that were in-
troduced in the PD program. Our analysis thus
considers JC’s articulations of his teacher iden-
tity and ethical self-formation in the incidental or
complementary accounts that emerged in his talk
about these strategies and his classroom practices
in general. We found JC’s concern with teach-
ing success to be highly salient throughout the
interviews and thus chose to examine how he
94
conceptualizes educational success for himself
and his students and what he treats as com-
monsense knowledge regarding what a teacher
must know or do or achieve in the classroom.
JC’s very particular accounts allow us to illustrate
the relevance of Foucault’s approach to ethical
self-formation for gaining a better understand-
ing of the authoritative discourses through which
teachers undertake identity work—work which
emerges as ethical responsiveness to the “identifi-
catory possibilities” (Linehan & McCarthy, 2000,
p. 440) that are constructed in particular social
practices.
JC teaches in an urban elementary school in
the southeastern region of the United States.
His school became a Professional Development
School in partnership with a nearby private
research university, a program that was funded
by a U.S. Department of Education grant. The
school and university became highly invested
in each other over a number of years with the
university team conducting PD workshops on a
regular basis. Eventually, it assigned a professor
in residence to the school. In this arrangement,
university courses were offered onsite at the
elementary school, and the university students in
these classes then worked as pre-service teachers
in the school. A number of collaborative research
projects involving the university professors and
graduate students as well as teachers from the
elementary school were developed over time as
well. JC often commented on how his school
administration’s investment in and commitment
to the PD program, including their efforts to
secure more resources for teachers, made their
program successful. By JC’s seventh year in the
interview study, he had been promoted from a
full-time classroom teacher to a resource teacher,
which positioned him as a support teacher to his
colleagues through providing additional training,
modeling lessons, finding necessary resources for
them, and supervising support staff. It also meant
that he served as a liaison between his elementary
school and the university research team, working
as their on-site coordinator for planning and
implementing new development initiatives. This
contextual information is important for under-
standing how JC’s identity work is mobilized in a
“constellation of language practices” (Pennycook
& Otsuji, 2014, p. 167) and in a school situation
where particular forms of PD are emphasized
and well supported. We also want to note that his
interactions with his interviewers seem to reflect
a shifting relationship over the 9 years, from
someone who was co-constructed as a newcomer
to the PD training to that of a peer with the
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
interviewer—someone who was as invested in
promoting and practicing the PD training as the
university team members who interviewed him.
JC was a relatively new teacher at the time the
first set of interviews was conducted. He had
taught 3rd graders for 2 years prior to the year
his administrators asked him to participate in an
intensive year-long PD program that focused on
pedagogies of reading for general and special
education teachers. This was the first year that
the program was active in his school, and it was
initiated at the same time that he became an
inclusion teacher for the first time. Becoming an
inclusion teacher in his third year of teaching
meant that JC’s 4th-grade classroom included
mostly mainstreamed students along with 7 to 9
students identified as having learning disabilities,
also known as exceptional students who re-
ceived additional services under the Exceptional
Student Education (ESE) provision. JC taught
Reading and Language Arts to these 4th graders
and thus addressed English language and literacy
concerns in his everyday teaching practices and
had many English–Spanish bilingual students in
his classroom. Tasked with teaching basic reading
and writing, JC worked to help his students learn
to listen carefully and to speak appropriately and
to develop his students’ ability to read multi-
modal materials in English. Following Cummins
(2001), language was central to the interper-
sonal relationships and forms of knowledge that
arose in JC’s classroom. It is fundamentally a
social practice—a recursive activity deeply em-
bedded in the negotiation of identities and the
understanding of content that emerge over time.
The four early interviews took place at the be-
ginning, middle, and end of JC’s first year of PD
training (also his first year as a designated inclu-
sion teacher), and in the middle of the following
year (1993–1995). The cluster of three late inter-
views occurred approximately 6 to 8 years later
(Years 7, 8, and 9 in the interview study, 2000–
2002). In analyzing JC’s teacher identity work, we
have adapted Clarke’s (2009) “Diagram for Do-
ing Identity Work” (p. 190; see Figure 1), given
that it draws on the four main dimensions or axes
of Foucault’s (1983) understanding of ethical self-
formation. Each of the four axes identified in Fig-
ure 1 is developed in the analysis that follows.
These axes of ethical self-formation operate dy-
namically and simultaneously; however, we hope
that by giving focused attention to each of them
separately, we can better analyze JC’s ethical en-
gagement in identity work that emerged through
his participation in the social practices valued
at his school. More importantly, we explore how
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
FIGURE 1
Diagram for Doing Teacher Identity Work
this commitment to ethical self-formation could
have led to his reimagining a teacher identity
that moved beyond powerful, taken-for-granted
notions of what being a successful teacher entails.
We take a somewhat chronological perspective,
considering the contrasts in JC’s identity displays
in the early versus the later interviews.
Analyzing the Substance of Teacher Identity
This component of identity work refers to the
material used to constitute one’s identity as a
teacher, including one’s practices, behaviors,
emotions, and/or values that are relevant to eth-
ical judgment. These are often conscious aspects
of one’s teacher identity and thus are amenable
to adaptation or transformation. The substance
of teacher identity can vary widely among teach-
ers. Farrell (2011), for example, discusses 16
language teacher role identities. As just a sample,
he includes vendor, entertainer, communication
controller, motivator, socializer, social worker,
collaborator, and learner as role identities fre-
quently adopted by and/or assigned to language
teachers. Likewise, Morgan (2009, drawing on
Kumaravadivelu [2003]), explores the role iden-
tities of technician, reflective practitioner, and
transformative practitioner as they relate to teach-
ing English for Academic Purposes. Both Farrell
(2011) and Morgan (2009) show that these iden-
tities not only inform teachers’ practices, they
also are differently amenable to critique and to
positive change. Teachers who view themselves
in a transformative role are far more inclined to
develop a macro awareness of powerful sociopo-
litical and economic influences on their teaching
and to seek out possibilities for “transformative
work at the micro level of the classroom” (Mor-
gan, 2009, p. 89). By contrast, when construed as
a vendor, teachers are typically highly dissatisfied
with this imposed identity but will often still
choose to adopt the practices necessary to “keep
the customers happy” in order to meet externally
95
determined student retention goals (Farrell,
2011, p. 59). In considering teachers’ choices in
adopting one or more of such role identities, it is
important to keep in mind that positions or roles
are made relevant in particular language prac-
tices; teachers do not choose or construct them
independently. At the same time, their identities
are not determined by these practices (though
some identities may be far easier to inhabit than
others due to local power configurations).
JC’s strong desire for and orientation to devel-
oping into a successful, effective teacher, as artic-
ulated across the seven interviews, seems to have
been based on his performance in the classroom,
primarily through his implementation of appro-
priate pedagogical practices. Though the criteria
by which one could define success or effective-
ness are usually left implicit, JC did frequently
comment on his struggles and efforts to help his
students perform well in the classroom (Guskey
[2002] notes that sustained student achievement
is the most commonly cited measure by which
teachers gauge their success). JC’s assessment of
his students’ performance as successful included
their socialization into appropriate classroom
comportment, but it primarily foregrounded
their improved academic achievement.
It is thus, perhaps, not surprising to find in-
dicators of JC’s anxiety in the early interviews.
His anxiety seems to have stemmed from his
lack of certainty in knowing how to teach his
students, but more importantly, in not knowing
how to gauge whether his students’ academic
performance was successful or not. For exam-
ple, JC’s comments in Excerpt 1, produced in
his second interview near the end of his first
semester as an inclusion teacher, describe his ESE
(i.e., exceptional or learning disabled) students’
academic progress as coming along, and he
noted that growth is going on. Not only are these
assessments tentative and vague, JC also used
other forms of tentative language (“kind of”) and
signaled his anxiety due to his not knowing (“it’s
96
hard to tell”) whether their achievement is all it
should be. He compared this discomfort to the
experience someone might have who grew up
without a father but is then asked to describe what
it is like to not have a father. JC’s example points
to a kind of helpless ignorance: How can one ever
know the difference if one has never experienced
having a father? This example also implicitly sug-
gests that a comparative standard of some sort is
necessary if he is to make a judgment on the value
or sufficiency of his students’ educational growth.
EXCERPT 1: Interview 2, Middle of Year 1
Well, so far every one of them [the “exceptional” stu-
dents] is coming along. It’s hard to tell where they
should be at, so, and that’s kind of, you know, it gives
you a feeling of anxiety because it’s like asking some-
one who didn’t have a father what it would have been
like if he had been raised with a father, and some-
thing like that, and it’s kind of hard to tell what you
would have missed. Uh, but I do know that they are
coming along much more than I thought … Growth
is going on. Sometimes you do question whether it is
all it should be, but growth is going on.
Interestingly, by the end of his first year as an
inclusion teacher (see Excerpt 2), we detect a de-
veloping confidence in JC’s sense of his ability
to be successful in the classroom. On this occa-
sion, he expressed strong delight (he was “very,
very, very happy”) because his ESE students had
made academic progress. And this time he does
not question whether that progress was real, based
merely on his sense that his students were grow-
ing academically. Elsewhere in this same interview
(not included in Excerpt 2), JC indicated that
he could “measure what progress they [ESE stu-
dents] made this year” by comparing their test
scores to “the percentage of progress that they did
in years gone by.” Rose (1999) uses the term ethical
technologies to refer to the “activities in which peo-
ple invest themselves and through which they ex-
press and manifest their worth and value as selves”
(p. 98).
EXCERPT 2: Interview 3, End of Year 1
And I really do feel very, very, very happy with the
outcome. Because we have been able to educate …
most of them [ESE students] have made enormous
progress, for sure, academically speaking. Behavior
speaking, everybody has made progress.
It seems that when JC’s desired teacher iden-
tity, as successful, was affirmed through his stu-
dents’ documented academic achievements, as
determined by objective measures such as test
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
scores and progress reports as well as their im-
proved classroom behavior, he exhibited greater
confidence in his teacher self (the tentative lan-
guage is gone) along with highly positive affect.
In the later interviews, 6 to 8 years following
these early interviews, JC commented directly on
his confidence and certainty in his identity as a
successful teacher. We see, for example, in Ex-
cerpt 3 taken from the final interview, JC’s con-
fident declaration that he believes that he can “be
successful as an educator anywhere I go.”
EXCERPT 3: Interview 7, Year 9
I think the single one thing that has changed in me is
confidence as an educator. I believe that I can be suc-
cessful as an educator anywhere I go. I have acquired
skills and knowledge in my dealings with the uni-
versity and children and in this position [as school–
university liaison] … I have become much more po-
litical and enlightened in ways that I know that I can
be successful. It is the confidence of knowing—not
the cockiness—but the confidence of knowing that I
can be successful in the classroom.
The substance of JC’s teacher identity, based
in his classroom performance and his students’
academic success, seems to have directly influ-
enced his efforts to undertake work on the self
by the self (i.e., ethical self-formation). We ap-
plaud JC’s hard-won assuredness in his identity as
a successful teacher. In his teacher role, he worked
incredibly hard, willingly accepted some of the
most challenging students into his classroom
(based on their behavioral and academic perfor-
mance), and took advantage of opportunities to
learn new classroom practices introduced by the
university PD team. That said, JC’s early lack of
certainty in his teacher self, though uncomfort-
able and distressing, also points to powerful op-
portunities for expanding his ongoing ethical self-
formation. That is, it is engaging in teaching prac-
tices “requiring judgment without guidelines or
guarantees, which call[s] forth and constitute[s]
the ethical dimensions of teaching” (Clarke &
Phelan, 2015, p. 12).
In tracing JC’s growing confidence as a teacher
across the interviews, we find frequent references
to the effectiveness of particular teaching strate-
gies and an implicit orientation to external, top-
down measures of teaching effectiveness and/or
student achievement. In considering how these
authority sources helped to establish JC’s teacher
identity as successful and effective, we can start to
see how his investment in this kind of identity may
have led him to limit his PD away from expanded
opportunities for “ethical agency” (Clarke &
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
Phelan, 2015, p. 12), even as his success and pro-
fessionalism increased.
Analyzing Authority Sources of Teacher Identity
The authority sources of ethical self-formation,
also referred to as “the mode of subjectivation”
(Foucault, 1997, p. 264), are norms that serve as a
framework by which teachers can weigh the mer-
its of their identity work. As with the substance of
teacher identity, the nature of authority sources
for teachers can be highly varied. Clarke (2009)
describes possible authority sources for teachers
in terms of particular values, such as valuing
experience over theory, or valuing teaching as a
form of service and sacrifice and thus orienting
to always putting students first, among others.
Though authority sources often serve to validate
a teacher’s ethical work on the self, they can also
have detrimental effects on teacher identities. In
LTI, for example, and particularly for so-called
nonnative teachers, the authority sources used
to determine the legitimacy of teacher identities
may include native speaker linguistic norms as
promoted in language textbooks and supported
by a massive English language teaching (ELT)
publication and teacher training industry. Thus,
language teachers may feel that their profes-
sional identities are validated only when their
students achieve high levels of grammatical,
lexical, or phonological accuracy according to
native speaker norms. Despite the impressively
large body of scholarly research supporting the
legitimacy of nonnative English speaking teach-
ers (NNESTs) as language teachers (see Selvi,
2014), they still must struggle with the deeply
engrained hegemony of native speakerism in
Applied Linguistics, which all too frequently
results in their marginalization (Kumaravadivelu,
2016; Selvi, 2014). Likewise, the growing need for
very particular forms of language teacher certifi-
cation and accreditation—powerful determiners
of employment potential—can serve as authority
sources that advance instrumental and functional
language curricula instead of content related to
social justice (Morgan, 2015).
We find that JC desired and placed great value
on clear achievement outcomes that could lend
certainty and legitimacy to his teaching prac-
tices, thus allowing him to experience greater
confidence in his teacher identity over time. It
may seem trite to emphasize JC’s reliance on
student test scores and top-down metrics. After
all, these are ubiquitous accountability measures
that shape many teachers’ experiences. And yet,
perhaps for that reason, JC’s implicit engagement
97
with this kind of authority source can help us
explore how ‘normal’ authority sources, and even
those that are feared or dreaded, can still factor
into the ethical work of many other teachers.
JC’s desire for validation of his effectiveness as a
teacher and the success of his students positioned
him as simultaneously dependent on top-down,
external assessment metrics as well as critical
of their intrusive dominance. For example, in
Excerpt 4, JC commented on his discomfort
(“there’s extra pressure”) with the frequent and
unannounced surveillance that his teaching
practices were subjected to (“a lot of people can
walk through the classroom”), a situation that
led him to feel as though he is constantly under
surveillance (“everyone’s looking at you”). But at
the same time, he seems to have accepted that
there is a target for how an acceptable classroom
should be conducted. That is, the validity of the
target or what constitutes current work or pro-
fessionalism in the classroom is not challenged
but accepted as commonsensical—the problem
comes in not knowing whether he measures up.
EXCERPT 4: Interview 2, Middle of Year 2
Everyone’s looking at you, at the program. A lot
of people can walk through the classroom. People
check how the children are doing. There are a lot of
eyes on you so there’s extra pressure to make sure ev-
erything is on target … . You have to make sure the
class looks professional, that the work the students
are doing is current and not just dittos [copied work-
sheets].
JC’s frustration with and criticism of the co-
ercive effects of ubiquitous assessment comes
through more passionately in an interview con-
ducted a year later. We see in Excerpt 5 a kind of
homily on real teaching.
EXCERPT 5: Interview 4, Year 2
If we are to teach, we have to take the reality of where
our kids are at and work from there on and try to
teach them and forget—as much as it is hard to do—
forget tests and scores and kind of make a commit-
ment to teaching, educating, and improving the kids.
It is just that sometimes we are so conscious of the fact
that we have to meet this and we have to improve that
number that we get so caught up in the stress of it.
JC’s stress in being caught between a desire
to “teach” versus to “improve the numbers” is
undoubtedly shared by many teachers. And yet,
even though JC’s ambivalence towards the ubiq-
uitous top-down assessment practices imposed on
schools never disappears. We see in Excerpt 6,
98
taken from his final interview, that he is “very
happy” that the test scores at his elementary
school improved 2 years in a row, that they
“achieved the numbers.” He also is “thrilled” that
his and his colleagues’ work “continues to be suc-
cessful” (as determined by external authorities),
even as he remains (mildly) critical of the “mov-
ing target” that schools are required to aim for.
EXCERPT 6: Interview 7, Year 9
This year I’m very happy to report that our [whole
school] scores have improved over the last 2 years
in reading, in writing, and in math. And that is very
important that not only did we achieve the numbers
we got last year with different students … but that
we have achieved that, those numbers, and exceeded
and increased them … Like Dr. [name redacted]
said the other day, you know, it’s hard to hit a mov-
ing target if it just keeps on moving up and up and
up and you don’t know exactly where it is, ah, so
you don’t know what to aim for exactly, but, ah, I
know that we have made progress so I’m very thrilled
to know that what we are doing continues to be
successful.
JC’s concern for and delight in the success-
ful test outcomes are not surprising. His earlier
expressed desire to “forget tests” in order to
“teach” (Excerpt 5) inevitably bumps against
imposed assessment practices that are hugely con-
sequential in determining his sense of success as
a teacher. In Excerpt 6, JC criticizes the “mov-
ing target” of test score rankings, but he does
not challenge whether the test outcomes should
be considered “educationally desirable” (Biesta,
2015, p. 80). Though it is not possible for him
to abandon testing and it is only ethical that
he help his students perform well on the tests,
the problem for JC’s identity work comes in his
shift away from his ambivalence about tests and
numbers to alignment with these dominant mea-
sures of success. It points to a narrowing of po-
tential for his ethical self-formation. It is under-
standable that JC, like many teachers, would de-
sire a sense of clarity and predictability. How-
ever, as Clarke (2009) comments, it is the realm
of the unexpected that provides teachers with
“creative potential” (p. 146) that should be cul-
tivated. Clarke (2009) argues that investment in
the apparent certainties as determined by author-
itative discourses is, in fact, an investment in an
inherently fragile identity given that the appar-
ent solidity of any discursive regime is “liable to
crack and fissure over time” (p. 195). As Fou-
cault might argue, this desire for solidity and pre-
dictability in teaching/learning outcomes can di-
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
minish our capacity to “endeavor to know how
and to what extent it might be possible to think
differently, instead of legitimating what is already
known … to explore what might be changed”
(p. 9, cited in Clarke, 2010, pp. 156–157).
Many language teachers actively pursue engag-
ing students with controversial topics, challenging
them to explore asymmetrical power relations
and inviting them to examine the political na-
ture of knowledge itself; but we know that such
efforts require great commitment and often
fall outside curricular standards. The learning
outcomes from such practices are often far less
predictable. It is also true that students often re-
sist challenging the status quo, which can “create
uneasiness” for teachers instead of confidence
and certainty (Kubota, 2014, p. 244). However,
as Kubota (2014) contends, following her own
experience with student resistance, such difficult
and uncertain moments not only require careful
judgment (i.e., there is no right method), they
can also lead critical language teachers to re-
consider their own perspectives and positions of
status that they have remained “attached to and
enter uncharted space of meanings” (p. 247).
Nurturing critically attuned ethical self-formation
requires more than “just looking inside oneself,
through the lens of one’s socialized conscience,”
it also means examining “how one is constituted
as a subject, subjectivated by different economies
of power” (Wain, 2007, p. 166, cited in Clarke,
2009, p. 196) that are part of the constellation
of language practices in which language teachers
perform their identity work.
Analyzing the Self-Practices of Teacher Identity
Practicing ethical self-formation can involve a
range of physical, mental, and even spiritual tech-
niques. They always require intentional change
to some aspect(s) of the self. Most importantly,
they hold the potential for broadening one’s
sense of identity and for challenging repressive
or discriminatory perceptions of the same that
one might have unthinkingly adopted. This po-
tential is poignantly demonstrated in Pavlenko’s
(2003) study of how pre-service and in-service En-
glish language teachers, in producing linguistic
autobiographies (one kind of technology of the
self), conducted reflective identity work through
their engagement with scholarly research on mul-
ticompetence and bilingualism. In so doing, they
came to reject deficit-oriented discourses of their
nonnative speaker identities and instead came to
“construe themselves and their future students as
legitimate L2 users rather than as failed native
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
speakers of the target language” (Pavlenko, 2003,
p. 251). Numerous other studies have demon-
strated the potential for counterdiscourse (Mor-
gan & Ramanathan, 2005, p. 156) that can arise
from language teachers’ intentional self-writing
practices (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2016; Park, 2012; Van-
drick, 2009).
For JC, the self-practices that seemed most rele-
vant to his identity of teaching success transpired
in the classroom. Though likely only a subset of
the many self-practices JC undertook in working
to achieve his ideal identity, the four strategies for
teaching reading that he learned in his school’s
PD program became a dominant theme in his
later interviews (Interviews 5–7). His frequent
references to these strategies suggest that they
were highly salient not only in his teaching prac-
tice but also to his identity work in constituting
himself as a successful teacher and thus were
important to his ethical self-formation. These
strategies are not mere teaching gimmicks, but
rather involve committed efforts to learning how
to (re)structure classroom teaching and learning
according to a series of organizational steps and
procedures (for more information on these steps
and procedures, see Cunningham & Hall, 1994;
Klingner et al., 2004; Mathes et al., 1994). In his
resource teacher position, JC became a commit-
ted ambassador for learning and implementing
the teaching strategies to his fellow teachers. He
commented at one point that his administration
had given “a clear message to the teachers that
these strategies are important because they con-
tribute to academic achievement and success”
(Interview 5, Year 7). In Excerpt 7, JC exhibited
his personal commitment to using the strategies,
which, as he indicated, “take a lot of effort to
implement and put together.” But he appears
to view such effort as worthwhile because of the
outcomes that ensued (growth) and because they
provided a clear manual for how to organize one’s
pedagogical practices so that class time is always
meaningful.
EXCERPT 7: Interview 6, Year 8
Everywhere that I have applied the strategy, I have
seen growth. I like the strategy because—the strate-
gies in general—because they are a meaningful way
to use my class time … These strategies take a lot of
effort to implement and put together, but they cre-
ate a routine that every minute is used meaningfully.
You don’t have to wonder what to do. You don’t have
to train your kids except in the beginning, then they
know what to do. It’s a very meaningful way to use
your class time.
99
JC’s displayed confidence in the viability of
the strategies as a mechanism for creating a
meaningful and successful classroom teaching
and learning environment illustrated in the pre-
ceding excerpt, taken from the Year 8 interview,
contrasts sharply with his approach to classroom
practice in the early interviews. For example, in
Excerpt 7, JC noted that when implementing the
strategies, “you don’t have to wonder what to do,”
which contrasts with his performed tentativeness,
already discussed in relation to Excerpt 1, in terms
of determining whether his students were pro-
gressing as they should (an implicit orientation
to authority sources). In addition, in his very first
interview, JC commented that a particular student
who had exhibited extreme misbehaviors and
learning challenges was coming along, and then
added, “I have invested a lot of time creating a re-
lationship with this child so I think it is paying off
now.” In Interview 2, when addressing the situa-
tion of attending to the needs of his ESE students,
JC said: “What I do is not so much a question of
strategy. I simply make sure that I assist them, that
we are there to explain things to them one on
one.” And in Interview 3, conducted at the end of
the first year of his inclusion teaching, JC used the
word “chemistry” six times in talking about seem-
ingly serendipitously achieved positive teacher–
student and student–student relationships, which
contributed to creating a positive classroom atmo-
sphere for learning. For example, in describing
how the ESE students in his classroom were even-
tually socialized into working independently and
taking initiative to seek help when needed, JC sug-
gests that that desired progress was helped along
because the “chemistry” of his classroom “worked
out that way.” He added, “I know I am not afraid
[to change teaching formats]. If next year I find
that the chemistry in my classroom requires that
I make adjustments, adjustments will be made,
because every child is different, and every group
is different, and we need to be open to that.”
JC’s orientation to relationship building for
teaching effectiveness (“I invested a lot of time
creating a relationship with this child”), his in-the-
moment strategizing (“I simply make sure that I
assist them”), his perception of the seemingly hap-
penstance state of relationships in his classroom
(“chemistry”) that was conducive to learning, as
well as his sense that teaching involves “mak[ing]
adjustments” in relation to “every child” and “ev-
ery group” contrasts starkly with the far greater
clarity and certainty he displayed in how to con-
duct his classrooms in the later interviews, already
demonstrated in Excerpt 7. In fact, in these later
interviews (Excerpt 8 as another example), JC
100
exhibited an almost dogmatic certainty that his
fellow teachers needed to be “trained” to follow
the strategies as they “should be done” so that they
do not become “watered down.”
EXCERPT 8: Interview 5, Year 7
I would like for them [fellow teachers] to do it the
way that it should be done on the outset, and that is
why I am providing this support, and I would like for
them to avoid so many modifications that they are no
longer doing what they are supposed to be doing. It
is so watered down that a mix and match of different
strategies that they feel comfortable with but that is
not what we want. So I will keep my eye on it. I want to
make sure that we have integrity in implementation.
His attachment to the strategies is sensible
given his investment in a successful teacher iden-
tity. He was committed to disciplining his teaching
practices in ways that would lead to success even
though they took “a lot of effort to implement
and put together.” It is important to add that his
seemingly dogmatic devotion to performing the
strategies with integrity was sensible because for
him they were a practice that enabled him “to do
the right thing” (Interview 6, Year 8) and as such
seemed to have played a crucial role in his ethical
self-formation. Even though the teaching strate-
gies that JC invested in appear to have resulted in
effective and desirable classroom practices, we ar-
gue that his disciplined implementation of them
seems to have led to diminished reflection on al-
ternatives.
Though focusing on teaching strategies may
not be the primary form of self-practice for many
language teachers’ ethical self-formation, the
desire for greater certainty and for clear path-
ways toward gaining teaching competence is un-
derstandably widespread, particularly among less
experienced teachers. It is noteworthy, for ex-
ample, that Richards and Rodgers’s (2014) well-
known volume, Approaches and Methods in Lan-
guage Teaching, first published in 1986, continues
to serve as a manual for language teachers and
is now in its third edition. But we also need to
keep in mind Britzman’s (2003) warning of how
cultural myths about schooling “provide a sem-
blance of order, control, and certainty in the face
of uncertainty and vulnerability of the teacher’s
world” (p. 222). Too great a reliance on pre-
fashioned teaching practices, often constructed as
evidence-based and thus likely to result in learn-
ing success, can overpower teachers’ critical en-
gagement in considering how adopting one set
of practices may forestall adopting others that
might lead to different forms of student success.
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
As Kubota (2014) notes in relation to critical lan-
guage teaching, there are “no definitive answers”
(p. 248) on how to go about teaching challenging,
controversial topics. While discomforting, such
a recognition helped Kubota realize anew the
need to “constantly reflect on how my moment-
to-moment pedagogical decision brings about in-
tellectual and emotional consequences to my stu-
dents and how it is linked to the transformation
of the real world” (p. 248).
Analyzing the Telos of Teacher Identity
The telos of ethical self-development is the
ideal identity that teachers imagine and construct
for themselves. In relation to Foucault’s (1983)
notion of ethical self-formation, telos refers to
“the accomplishment of, or quest to achieve an
accomplishment of mastery over oneself, the sort
of person one wishes to be” (Niesche & Haase
2012, p. 279). A teacher’s telos directly influences
his or her identity work. We should not, however,
think of telos as simply a personal goal; one’s telos
is formed in relation to broader sociopolitical val-
ues and expectations. Telos can thus be compared
to Norton’s (2000, 2013) notion of investment in
an imagined identity, which entails an imagined
desirable future and membership in an imagined
community of practice. Though typically adopted
in relation to language learners, the notion of
investment is equally useful for considering how
and why language teachers commit their energy
and time to achieving an imagined identity.
Darvin and Norton (2015) discuss at length how
an individual’s investment in a desired future is
informed and shaped by dominant views of the
world and human relations (i.e., ideologies) but is
also shaped by an individual’s opportunities and
capacity to convert or transform their existing
symbolic capital into new forms of valuable capital
(symbolic, social, and possibly even economic).
One might also compare telos to language learn-
ers’ or teachers’ possible selves (Dörnyei, 2005;
Dörnyei & Kubaniyova, 2014). The concept of
possible selves proposes that an individual’s vision
of a desired outcome—such as language learning
success—can “incite and direct purposeful be-
havior” (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015, p. 96), leading to
desirable change. However, we see its grounding
in the psychology of self or the self-system as
missing the ethical component that is an integral
part of Foucault’s (1983) notion of telos. One’s
telos can be framed as vision or an imagined
identity, but it is necessarily formed by an ethical
purpose (cf. a critical philosophy of teaching;
Crookes, 2015). A language teacher’s telos, of
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
whatever form, motivates ongoing critique of and
change to self because of his or her investment
in and engagement with others (students and
colleagues) as well as to one’s self (Clarke, 2010).
The following excerpt, taken from JC’s final
interview, displays him as a teacher who contin-
ued to exert his best efforts and who continued
to value effective teaching practices. He had a
purpose: “you teach to be effective.” At this point
in his teaching life, JC no longer appeared tenta-
tive about how to function in a classroom; there
is no hesitation in his descriptions of the effective
teaching strategies that he used that allowed him
to be very deliberate about the things he said and
did in the classroom. He also attributed his ability
to achieve success to being “part of a team,” point-
ing to the relational aspect of self-development,
and in this case, he linked together learning about
yourself and learning about what to do and what not
to with learning a lot about teaching strategies.
EXCERPT 9: Interview 7, Year 9
Because when you are part of a team that is very suc-
cessful, you learn a lot. You learn a lot about teach-
ing strategies, about yourself, about what to do and
what not to do. And I have used the time in this job
to continue to learn, not necessarily to sit back, and,
you know, ah do the least amount possible. On the
contrary, I think I continue to work with children be-
cause it brings integrity to what I do, and it keeps me
in touch with the classroom and with classroom man-
agement and with effective teaching strategies … I
guess you do have a purpose, more purpose in what
you do. You teach to be effective and not just to fill
in time or paper. I mean, that you are very deliberate
about the things you say or do in your classroom.
It seems, then, that JC’s telos has largely been
achieved. He appears to have achieved mastery
over his teacher self by committing himself to
learning and using the teaching strategies he
learned in his PD training as self-practices. These
practices could be validated by authority sources
such as test scores. And his efforts are a form of
ethical work in that he deliberately engaged in
practices that he perceived would allow him to de-
velop into an effective teacher, an identity that he
saw as desirable and morally good, that is, it was
doing “the right thing.” Furthermore, his desire to
be successful is not selfish given that it is based in
the success of his students and his fellow teachers,
pointing to his ethos of care for others. He con-
tinues to value and actively seek out “work[ing]
with children,” seemingly in order to maintain
the integrity of his hard-won expertise. He does
not want his facility with implementing classroom
101
teaching strategies to lose their relational value,
to become pure technique.
And yet we still need to challenge JC’s vision or,
more importantly, the instrumental, externally
derived vision of PD and teacher education that
seems to have defined successful achievement for
him and that has shaped his professional telos.
In witnessing JC’s development from tentative to
confident teacher, we need to understand that
his active work to improve himself as a teacher,
that is, his ethical self-formation, emerged from
his participation in a constellation of practices
in which histories of power relations and con-
temporary education policies inform his identity
work. These practices are powerful generators
of notions of success that involve “achiev[ing]
the numbers” (see Excerpt 6), though, of course,
this does not mean that there is only one version
of success possible for JC. In fact, JC’s displayed
ambivalence regarding what he viewed as real
teaching in which teachers should “kind of make a
commitment to teaching, educating and improv-
ing the kids” versus “improv[ing] the numbers on
test scores” (Excerpt 5, Interview 4, Year 2) points
to the struggle involved in achieving his telos and
foregrounds the ever-present need for teachers
to make judgments, to exercise “ethical agency”
(Clarke, 2009, p. 195). As language teacher edu-
cators, we need to seek out ways of expanding the
imagined parameters of success—and subsequent
self-worth—that teachers such as JC encounter
through their practices of ethical self-formation.
We need to create and nurture spaces in which
language teachers can reflect on how to respond
to and engage with the constellation of language
practices that they regularly participate in. We
address these challenges and their curricular
implications in the Discussion section.
DISCUSSION
Common to both teacher education and lan-
guage teacher education, a primary objective is
to bring about change in classroom practices that
can lead to improved learning outcomes (Guskey,
2002). This kind of PD is only possible when
teachers give conscious consideration to what
they do and how they see themselves. There is cer-
tainly great potential for PD efforts to help mo-
bilize language teachers’ ethical judgments and
to generate greater awareness among teachers of
their subjectivity or positioning in relation to pow-
erful discourses associated with the nature and
value of language teaching/learning as well as
in relation to discourses on educational achieve-
ment in general. Indeed, in LTE this potential has
102
been addressed via a range of self-reflective tech-
nologies such as narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen,
2011; De Costa, 2015; Tsui, 2007), journal writing
(Zhang & Zhang, 2015), and auto-ethnography
(Canagarajah, 2012; Herath & Valencia, 2015),
among others.
At the same time, it is important to recognize
the crucial difference between Foucault’s (1983,
1997) conception of reflective and pragmatic en-
gagement in ethical self-formation versus the self-
policing or self-regulation advocated in many
neoliberal reform agendas. These neoliberal re-
forms often promote an individualistic preoccu-
pation in which educational failures are cast as
an effect of teachers’ lack of expertise (Fenwick,
2003, p. 339; see also Larsen, 2010). Language
teachers typically want to perform as and be con-
sidered as professionals and are eager to develop
their teaching practices and teacher selves in
order to gain necessary expertise. Thus, they often
willingly undertake “relentless and never-ending
self-development” (Clarke & Phelan, 2015, p. 6;
see also Morgan, 2015) in pursuit of achieving suc-
cess in the classroom.
In promoting work on the self in order to
foster language teachers’ critical engagement
with their identity work, LTE efforts need to
take care to avoid inadvertently contributing to
teachers’ over-preoccupation with their perceived
deficiencies—thus motivating them to constantly
police themselves according to pre-established
standards. Likewise, an emphasis on conscious
reflection can lead to an over-emphasis on lan-
guage teachers’ reason and rational choice as con-
quering all, thereby neglecting the inescapable
involvement of teachers’ emotions, their uncon-
scious, and their bodies (Fenwick, 2003). At the
same time, an exclusive focus on emotions, em-
bodiment, and intuitions risks isolating individual
experiences and responses from the systemic and
societal forms of exploitation and/or discrimina-
tion that cause and sustain them. Instead, as Be-
nesch (2012) argues in the context of Critical En-
glish Language Teaching, we should attempt to
forge explicit links between affect/embodiment
and social critique/rational analysis, engaging in
the discomforting, visceral reactions that partic-
ular discursive practices afford and linking them
to broader social power relations and inequalities
(see e.g., Critical ELT and Affect, pp. 90–92).
Following Benesch (2012), practices of ethical
self-formation in LTE require both emotional
and rational forms of reading/writing, reflective
actions that encourage active exploration of
embodied experiences in relation to controlling
sociopolitical discourses and the myriad educa-
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
tional policies affecting their day-to-day teaching
lives. In the mediation of these broader discourses
and policies, language teachers’ identity work
necessarily involves the ongoing exercise of judg-
ment and critique as they engage with language
as a social practice. Though Clarke and Phelan
(2015) note that there are no guarantees that
these judgments will lead to the outcomes that
(language) teachers desire, they also contend that
an emphasis on gaining certainty and predictable
outcomes can “sideline teachers’ moral judgment
and disavow the ethico-political dimension of
teaching” (p. 4). Even so, the lack of guarantees
does not mean that formalized, schooled tech-
niques of ethical self-formation (i.e., narrative
inquiry, journal writing, auto-ethnography, etc.)
should be avoided. Rather, such technologies
need to be seen as always dangerous and always re-
quiring vigilance on the part of language teacher
educators (see Morgan & Clarke, 2011). As
Foucault (1997) argues, “My point is not that ev-
erything is bad, but that everything is dangerous,
which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything
is dangerous, then we always have something to
do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a
hyper- and pessimistic activism” (p. 256).
In exploring the ethical potential for LTE, we
wish to reiterate the value of interdisciplinarity
(cf. DFG, 2016). The proximity of pedagogical
interests between teacher education and lan-
guage teacher education illuminate possible
areas of curricular intervention in respect to
identity work and ethical self-formation. First,
an important commonality across both fields
is the growing emphasis on narrowly defined
notions of “success” (i.e., the authority sources of
teacher identity or second axis of identity work)
measured against top-down, externally derived
criteria, whose putative scientificity and objec-
tivity serve to disguise particular power relations
and displace the critical options that (language)
teachers might consider as more relevant for the
types of difference and inequality they encounter
in their classes and need to explore via ethical
practices of self-formation (i.e., the self-practices
of the third axis of identity work). In JC’s case it
is important to note that his emerging identity as
an inclusion teacher involved an authorized field
of action that focused on exceptional students.
It is through such integrity-forming practices
(see Excerpt 9) that a teacher’s telos (the fourth
axis of identity work) is formed and maintained.
Missing here (via the second axis of authority
sources), however, are other exceptionalities
warranting attention, those marked by race, class,
or sexuality, against which a (language) teacher’s
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
local interventions can effect meaningful change
on local terms that exceed and/or elude the
narrow forms of success officially offered.
We also wish to reiterate that JC’s conformity/
success—and the opportunities/exceptionalities
subsequently lost—draws important parallels to
one of the more enduring and marginalized pro-
fessional identities in ELT, the NNEST. Specific
to ELT, issues related to the ownership of lan-
guage, linguistic forms of demonstrated exper-
tise (i.e., center-based phonological and lexico-
grammatical forms of “standardized” English),
and signifiers of race and ethnicity (Motha,
2014) construct hierarchies of legitimacy in which
the professional identity options for NNESTs
are subordinated vis-à-vis so-called native speak-
ing teachers (Moussu & Llurda, 2008; Reis,
2015). Against/within these marginalizing au-
thority sources of identity formation (i.e., the
second axis of identity work), the narrowed,
success-oriented practices of NNESTs’ ethical
self-formation (i.e., the third axis of identity
work) are likely to be focused on reproduc-
ing exo-normative standards of language through
center-based theories and methods (cf. “epis-
temic dependencies”; Kumaravadivelu, 2012).
The exceptionalities lost or unexplored, in this
case, would be the nativized varieties and lin-
gua franca options that might be integrated
in outer and expanding circle ELT programs.
And similar to JC, new curricular exceptional-
ities related to race, class, and sexuality might
be possible, but with the field-internal option of
examining their linguistic (lexico-grammatical)
representation and alignment with powerful
discourses.
As often is the case, language teacher edu-
cators need to consider what can and cannot
be done with respect to the practices of ethical
self-formation described in this article. By incor-
porating critically reflective action projects into
their programs, for example, LTE can provide re-
sources to teachers for expanding their ethical
self-formation (Martin & Morgan, 2015; Morgan,
2009). LTE can work to push against normative
notions of success or effectiveness by exploring
transgressive cases—cases of teachers and teacher
educators playing the “games of truth” (Foucault,
1997, p. 296) differently, thereby planting the
seeds for teachers to imagine a different kind
of telos for themselves. Such work must directly
problematize dominant notions of success as de-
termined by quantitative outcomes, assessment
metrics, and economistic utility, thereby planting
the seeds for teachers to orient to other types of
authority sources (Fenwick, 2003). The work of
103
LTE does not result in immediate change. It can
only lay the foundations and strive to foster net-
works of support. Teachers’ ethical self-formation
involves ongoing, recursive actions based in ret-
rospective reflection that accounts for the rela-
tionship between self and others, reflection that
is always outwardly oriented. Though LTE can-
not control teachers’ telos (nor should it), an im-
portant motivation for persisting in efforts to fos-
ter ethical self-formation comes from Britzman
(2003) who argues that “when the power of indi-
vidual effort becomes abstracted from the dynam-
ics of the social,” teachers are less likely to “inter-
vene in the complex conditions that push them
to take up the normative practices that discourage
their desires for change” (p. 223). This is the “dan-
gerous territory” into which we should not fear to
tread.
REFERENCES
Barkhuizen, G. (2011). Narrative knowledging in
TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 45, 391–414.
Barkhuizen, G. (Ed.). (2016). Reflections on lan-
guage teacher identity research. New York: Rout-
ledge/Taylor & Francis.
Benesch, S. (2012). Considering emotions in critical English
language teaching. New York: Routledge/Taylor &
Francis.
Biesta, G. (2015). What is education for? On good ed-
ucation, teacher judgement, and educational pro-
fessionalism. European Journal of Education, 50, 75–
87.
Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical
study of learning to teach. Albany, NY: State Univer-
sity of New York Press.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2012). Teacher development in a
global profession: An autoethnography. TESOL
Quarterly, 46, 258–279.
Cheung, Y. L., Said, S. B., & Park, K. (Eds.). (2015). Ad-
vances and current trends in language teacher identity
research. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Clarke, M. (2008). Language teacher identities: Co-
constructing discourse and community. Clevedon, UK:
Multilingual Matters.
Clarke, M. (2009). The ethico-politics of teacher iden-
tity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41, 185–200.
Clarke, M. (2010). Doing “identity work” in teacher edu-
cation: The case of a UAE teacher. In A. E. Mazawi
& R. G. Sultana (Eds.), Education and the Arab
“world”: Political projects, struggles, and geometries of
power (pp. 145–162). New York: Routledge/Taylor
& Francis.
Clarke, M., & Hennig, B. (2013). Motivation as ethical
self-formation. Educational Philosophy and Theory,
45, 77–90.
104
Clarke, M., & Phelan, A. (2015). The power of negative
thinking in and for teacher education. Power and
Education, 7, 257–271.
Crookes, G. V. (2015). Redrawing the boundaries
on theory, research, and practice concerning
language teachers’ philosophies and language
teacher cognition: Toward a critical perspective.
Modern Language Journal, 99, 485–499.
Cummins, J. (2001). Negotiating identities: Education for
empowerment in a diverse society (2nd ed.). Ontario,
CA: California Association for Bilingual Educa-
tion.
Cunningham, P. M., & Hall, D. (1994). Making words.
Greensboro, NC: Good Apple.
Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of
investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56.
De Costa, P. I. (2015). Tracing reflexivity through a nar-
rative and identity lens. In Y. L. Cheung, S. B. Said,
& K. Park (Eds.), Advances and current trends in lan-
guage teacher identity research (pp. 135–147). New
York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
De Costa, P. I. (Ed.). (2016). Ethics in applied linguistics
research: Language researcher narratives. New York:
Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Dörnyei, Z. (2005). The psychology of the language learner:
Individual differences in second language acquisition.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Dörnyei, Z., & Kubanyiova, M. (2014). Motivating learn-
ers, motivating teachers: Building vision in the language
classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dörnyei, Z., & Ryan, S. (2015). The psychology of the lan-
guage learner revisited. New York: Routledge/Taylor
& Francis.
Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary frame-
work for SLA in a multilingual world. Modern Lan-
guage Journal, 100 (Supplement 2016), 19–47.
Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, R. (1983). Michel Foucault:
Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed.).
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Farrell, T. S. C. (2011). Exploring the professional role
identities of experienced ESL teachers through re-
flective practice. System, 39, 54–62.
Fenwick, T. J. (2003). The “good” teacher in a neo-
liberal risk society: A Foucaultian analysis of pro-
fessional growth plans. Journal of Curriculum Stud-
ies, 35, 335–354.
Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power: Afterword.
In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Be-
yond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–264).
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H.
Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton, (Eds.), Tech-
nologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp.
16–49). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics, subjectivity and truth: Essential
works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 (P. Rabinow,
Ed., R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: The New Press.
García, O., & Li Wei. (2014). Translanguaging: Language,
bilingualism and education. Basingstoke, UK: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
The Modern Language Journal, 101, Supplement 2017
Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional development and
teacher change. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and
Practice, 8, 381–391.
Hafernik, J. J., Messerschmitt, D. S., & Vandrick, S.
(2014). Ethical issues for ESL faculty: Social justice in
practice. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Herath, S., & Valencia, M. (2015). Neither “A complete
insider” nor “A complete outsider”: Autoethno-
graphies of two teacher-educators-in-the-making.
In Y. L. Cheung, S. B. Said, & K. Park (Eds.), Ad-
vances and current trends in language teacher identity
research (pp. 31–43). New York: Routledge/Taylor
& Francis.
Hicks, D. (2000). Self and other in Bakhtin’s early
philosophical essays: Prelude to a theory of prose
consciousness. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7, 227–
242.
Infinito, J. (2003). Ethical self-formation: A look at the
later Foucault. Educational Theory, 53, 155–171.
Johnston, B. (2003). Values in English language teaching.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Klingner, J. K., Vaughn, S., Arguelles, M. E., Hughes, M.
T., & Leftwich, S. A. (2004). Collaborative strate-
gic reading: “Real world” lessons from classroom
teachers. Remedial and Special Education, 25, 291–
302.
Kramsch, C. (2012). Imposture: A late modern notion in
poststructuralist SLA research. Applied Linguistics,
33, 483–502.
Kubota, R. (2014). “We must look at both sides”—But
a denial of genocide too?: Difficult moments on
controversial issues in the classroom. Critical In-
quiry in Language Studies, 11, 225–251.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond methods: Macro-
strategies for language teaching. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012). Individual identity, cultural
globalization and teaching English as an interna-
tional language: The case for an epistemic break.
In L. Alsagoff, W. Renandya, G. Hu, & S. McKay
(Eds.), Teaching English as an international lan-
guage (pp. 9–27). New York: Routledge/Taylor &
Francis.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2016). The decolonial option in
English teaching: Can the subaltern act? TESOL
Quarterly, 50, 66–85.
Larsen, M. A. (2010). Troubling the discourse of teacher
centrality: A comparative perspective. Journal of Ed-
ucation Policy, 25, 207–231.
Linehan, C., & McCarthy, J. (2000). Positioning in prac-
tice: Understanding participation in the social
world. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 30,
435–453.
Martin, I., & Morgan, B. (2015). Preparing teachers for
“unequal Englishes”: The D–TEIL experience in
Cuba. In R. Tupas (Ed.), Unequal Englishes: The pol-
itics of Englishes today (pp. 244–264). New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Mathes, P. G., Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., Henley, A. M.,
& Sanders, A. (1994). Increasing strategic read-
ing practice with Peabody classwide peer tutoring.
Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 9, 44–48.
Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1998). The tree of knowl-
edge: The biological roots of human understanding,
(2nd ed.). Boston: Shambhala Publications.
McNamara, T. (2012). Poststructuralism and its chal-
lenges for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics,
33, 473–482.
Messerschmitt, D., Hafernik, J. J., & Vandrick, S. (1997).
Culture, ethics, scripts, and gifts. TESOL Journal, 7,
11–14.
Miller, E. R. (2011). Indeterminacy and interview re-
search: Co-constructing ambiguity and clarity in
interviews with an adult immigrant learner of En-
glish. Applied Linguistics, 32, 43–59.
Miller, E. R. (2014). The language of adult immigrants:
Agency in the making. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Mat-
ters.
Morgan, B. (2009). Fostering transformative practition-
ers for critical EAP: Possibilities and challenges.
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8, 86–99.
Morgan, B. (2015). Teaching for market-place utility:
Language teacher identity and the certification of
adult ESL teachers in Ontario. In Y. L. Cheung,
S. B. Said, & K. Park (Eds.), Advances and current
trends in language teacher identity research (pp. 235–
249). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Morgan, B., & Clarke, M. (2011). Identity in second lan-
guage teaching and learning. In E. Hinkel (Ed.),
Handbook of research in second language teaching and
learning (2nd ed; pp. 817–836). New York: Rout-
ledge/Taylor & Francis.
Morgan, B., & Ramanathan, V. (2005). Critical litera-
cies and language education: Global and local per-
spectives. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25,
151–169.
Motha, S. (2014). Race, empire, and English language teach-
ing: Creating responsible and ethical anti-racist practice.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Moussu, L., & Llurda, E. (2008). Non-native English-
speaking English language teachers: History and
research. Language Teaching, 41, 315–348.
Niesche, R., & Haase, M. (2012). Emotions and ethics:
A Foucauldian framework for becoming an ethi-
cal educator. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44,
276–288.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: So-
cial processes and educational practice. London: Long-
man.
Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Ex-
tending the conversation. Bristol, UK: Multilingual
Matters.
Norton, B., & Morgan, B. (2013). Poststructuralism.
In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of ap-
plied linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell. doi:
10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0924
Ortega, L. (2005). Methodology, epistemology, and
ethics in instructed SLA research: An introduc-
tion. Modern Language Journal, 89, 317–327.
Park, G. (2012). “I am never afraid of being recognized
as an NNES”: One teacher’s journey in claim-
105
ing and embracing her nonnative-speaker iden-
tity. TESOL Quarterly, 46, 127–151.
Pavlenko, A. (2003). “I never knew I was a bilingual”:
Reimagining teacher identities in TESOL. Jour-
nal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2, 251–
268.
Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as local practice. New
York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Pennycook, A., & Otsuji, E. (2014). Metrolingualism: Lan-
guage in the city. New York: Routledge/Taylor &
Francis.
Reis, D. S. (2015). Making sense of emotions in NNESTs’
professional identities and agency. In Y. L. Che-
ung, S. B. Said, & K. Park (Eds.), Advances and cur-
rent trends in language teacher identity research (pp.
31–43). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2014). Approaches and
methods in language teaching (3rd ed.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rose, N. (1999). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power,
and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Selvi, A. F. (2014). Myths and misconceptions about
nonnative English speakers in the TESOL
(NNEST) movement. TESOL Journal, 5, 573–
611.
Talmy, S. (2010). Qualitative interviews in applied lin-
guistics: From research instrument to social prac-
tice. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 128–
148.
Trent, J., Gao, X., & Gu, M. (2014). Language teacher edu-
cation in a multilingual context: Experiences from Hong
Kong. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.
Tsui, A. (2007). Complexities of identity formation: A
narrative inquiry of an EFL teacher. TESOL Quar-
terly, 4, 657–680.
Vandrick, S. (2009). Interrogating privilege: Reflections of a
second language educator. Ann Arbor, MI: The Uni-
versity of Michigan Press.
Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B., & Johnson, K.
A. (2005). Theorizing language teacher identity:
Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Lan-
guage, Identity and Education, 4, 21–44.
Wain, K. (2007). Foucault: The ethics of self-creation
and the future of education. In M. A. Peters & T.
A. C. Belsey (Eds.), Why Foucault: New directions in
educational research (pp. 163–180). New York: Peter
Lang.
Wong, M. S., & Canagarajah, S. (Eds.) (2009). Christian
and critical English language educators in dialogue:
Pedagogical and ethical dilemmas. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Zhang, L. J., & Zhang, D. (2015). Identity matters: An
ethnography of two Nonnative English-Speaking
Teachers (NNESTs) struggling for legitimate pro-
fessional participation. In Y. L. Cheung, S. B.
Said, & K. Park (Eds.), Advances and current trends
in language teacher identity research (pp. 116–131).
New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.